Aprakos is a kind of

Gospel Gospel originally meant the Christian message (" the gospel"), but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was set out. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words a ...

or Acts of the Apostles book, otherwise known as weekly or service Gospel (Acts). In aprakoses, the text is organized not in the natural order of books, but along with the weekly church readings starting from the Holy (

Easter Easter,Traditional names for the feast in English are "Easter Day", as in the '' Book of Common Prayer''; "Easter Sunday", used by James Ussher''The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher, Volume 4'') and Samuel Pepys''The Diary of Samuel ...

) Week as used in the

Eastern Orthodox Church The Eastern Orthodox Church, also called the Orthodox Church, is the second-largest Christian church, with approximately 220 million baptized members. It operates as a communion of autocephalous churches, each governed by its bishops vi ...

. In particular, the text of Aprakos-Gospels begins with the first chapter of Gospel according to John (''In the beginning was the Word...''), whereas regular Gospels (''Tetra-Gospels'') begin with the Gospel according to Matthew (''The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David...''). Many of the oldest Slavic manuscripts are aprakoses, like Codex Assemanius, Ostromir Gospels or Vukan's Gospel. Similar books used in the Western Christianity (

Catholic Church The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

and others) are known as

Lectionaries A lectionary ( la, lectionarium) is a book or listing that contains a collection of scripture readings appointed for Christian or Judaic worship on a given day or occasion. There are sub-types such as a "gospel lectionary" or evangeliary, and ...

(the term of much broader meaning), or (Gospels only) as Evangeliarium or Evangelistarium.

External links

A discussion on the word "aprakos"
Eastern Orthodox liturgical books {{Christian-book-stub ru:Апракос